In 2001, Congress passed a resolution that made October Family History Month, when we’re encouraged to delve into our family stories. As we look to the past, we uncover universal experiences that connect us to one another.
These experiences have long been explored in literature, particularly in generational family sagas. Love, grief, growth, and the pull of family are beautifully rendered in these stories you should listen to.
A sweeping saga about four generations of a family who live and love on an enchanting island off the coast of Italy.
Listen to an excerpt The House at the Edge of Night
Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. There they must hastily deal with a situation that challenges them both. When they confront each other again decades later, this secret from the past emerges, and their family must either break apart or stay together.
Listen to an excerpt Saints for All Occasions
Celebrated brain surgeon Thomas Eapen has been sitting on his porch, talking to dead relatives. So his daughter, Amina, comes home to help. Soon realizing things are more complicated than her mother has led her to believe, Amina discovers she must confront her family’s painful past to help her father.
Listen to an excerpt The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing
From Red’s father and mother, newly arrived in Baltimore in the 1920s, to Abby and Red’s grandchildren, carrying the family legacy boisterously into the twenty-first century, here are four generations of Whitshanks, their lives unfolding in and around a sprawling, lovingly worn Baltimore house.
Listen to an excerpt A Spool of Blue Thread
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a better life. After her first children, twins, die, she gives birth to nine more children. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
Listen to an excerpt The Twelve Tribes of Hattie